The Crafting (1)

Today was the day that Jien had chosen to finally attempt his first run of the creation of his weapon that would be added to the fencing style. He hoped for success, after all he had spent quite some time testing his theories and processes before taking this step. If this truly worked, at least to some degree, he would be able to refine the process with time and proper training.

The prior evening after his daily training he had asked for the day off from his training routine, knowing that this process would be intense and time consuming. Each piece would likely take him quite some time individually based on his prior experiments and together they would take most of the morning if not directly into the afternoon. He hoped for the best in terms of the amount of work this project would be but he was also prepared for the worst.

He sat before the three types of plants, keeping them at just enough distance that they wouldn't be able to attack him. He was currently meditating, focusing on the process ahead and doing his best to keep his nerves calm. He knew that even if he failed he could always give it another shot with slightly changed materials and methods but just like a youth taking an exam he still had difficulties shaking the slight nervousness.

After about twenty minutes of silent meditation he opened his eyes. He focused on the specific knowledge regarding alchemical splicing and let it run through his mind once more to make sure he wasn't missing anything in his plan. While the knowledge would always be at his fingertips he had not mastered the art of pulling forward the knowledge while in the process of completing an action. Generally even though he had narrowed the topics down so that his mind wouldn't be flooded, the amount of information he would receive would cause him a short pause that could be the difference between success and failure. To handle this issue he opted to review the knowledge once again directly before each stage.

There would be three stages, the first would be the splicing of the three plants, Serpent Vine, Creeping Moss and Magic Mandrake. Then, as opposed to what some may think the next step was to lay out the blacksmithing formation. This was because he would need to fold his chosen formations into the blacksmithing formation. To do this they would need to be layered atop it so that the moment that he used the blacksmithing formation they would be intertwined with the material being shaped. This was likely the way that his gifted rapier was formed and he hoped that it would work as well as some of his experiments had.

The first step of the process was to splice the plant materials. He was going to use the Serpent Vine as the base material and fuse the Creeping Moss and the Magic Mandrake. This would be a two part process, the first would be the fusion of the Serpent Vine with the essence of the creeping moss. Toward this he needed to find both the aspect of the Creeping Moss he would want to fuse into the Serpent Vine as well as at least one strong similarity between the plants to created the fusion on.

Luckily for Jien this first splicing would be the simpler of the two. He wanted to give the Serpent Vine the ability to expand that the Creeping Moss had. He wanted to make it so that the Serpent Vine wouldn't be contained to its natural growth pattern and would be able to expand and contract as needed. The matching characteristics were easy as well. Not only were the plants from the same general environment, mainly dense forests, but they also had the habit of attacking anything that came close to them. That aggressive nature would be a perfect binding point.

He started by drawing a containment formation and using a single pebble sized mana crystal as fuel so that he would not have to fuel it himself. The Creeping Moss had been kept in a special container that kept it from attacking but also allowed it to be kept healthy. To extract its essence it would need to be removed from the container in the form of an earthen jar. Jien took the jar and dumped the dark green moss on top of the formation. Immediately the moss tried to expand in his direction rapidly, lurching forward with a surprising momentum before colliding with an invisible wall.

Jien sighed when he saw that his formation worked properly. He then focused on the process for extracting essence from living materials. It was a harder process since you would be grappling with the material as extracting its essence would ultimately lead to death. Luckily for plants they tended to have less fight in them than that of animals. Jien sent a strand of his mana into the Creeping Moss and began trying to use this mana as a conductor to draw the essence or life force of the moss to one location in the moss. The process was agonizingly flow but he managed bit by bit. As the essence was drawn to single point one could see the moss dying, its edges turning brown. 

Slowly the brown seemed to spread from the outer edges to the center of the moss, where the strand of mana had successfully acted as a magnet. After he was sure that he had gathered all of the essence that he could he carefully drew his mana back, pulling with it a vague white mist. He quickly took out a jar with mana formations on it and drew the white mist into it before sealing it tightly. Only after triple checking the end result did he sigh in relief and let his shoulders slump.

His back was covered in sweat, his brows already showing a hint of exhaustion. The moss may not have been able to put up much of a fight but the level of fine tuned control he needed to consistently exert was enough to make him feel that he needed a break. Luckily Runa, being ever thoughtful in her selection of tools for alchemy had provided him with the proper vessel to store something as delicate as the essence of a material.

 He would be able to take a short break before moving onto the hardest part. He would need to successfully make the Serpent Vine fuse with the properties he wanted and hope that the outcome would be acceptable to his main goal.